Mandrake Linux 10.1-Community Edition Review

“Mandrake 10.1 Community, released in Sept. 16 is an incremental upgrade to Mandrake 10. The new features make it a worthy upgrade for home users but the bugs that remain are certainly not what a business desktop should upgrade to until later when the Official version is released.”Read the review at SpiderTools.

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34 Comments

reviewers shouldn’t expect community to work, it’s basically just a beta release. who knows why mandrake wants to scare off users by releasing a beta and calling it a nice word like “community”.

2004-09-19 11:54 pm

The only problem with these Mandrake tools / Control Centers is that they are Mandrake specific. If you go sit down at a SuSE/RedHat/Fedora/Debian/Slackware/Gentoo/Whatever distro, those tools don’t exist. I’d rather see those tools get implemented at a “lower” level so I don’t have to learn a new way of doing things for each distro. The CLI is a little more consistent, but each distro still has their own way of doing a lot of things even at the command line. Of course this is to be expected to some extent, or you wouldn’t have different distributions in the first place … but …

2004-09-20 12:10 am

If you want some (basic at the moment) tools that work across distros, take a look at Gnome Setup Tools, which I believe is now included in Gnome 2.8

2004-09-20 12:12 am

Mandrake was my first distro I used it up to mandrake 10. I always explored other distros to find a replacement and I found it in Debian. I am happier with the speed and apt-get. I don’t miss Mandrake at all but I do still think Mandrake is a great linux to start out on and I do wish them luck.

2004-09-20 12:37 am

If you want some (basic at the moment) tools that work across distros, take a look at Gnome Setup Tools, which I believe is now included in Gnome 2.8

Agreed. And the Gnome 2.8 tools are exactly what I had in mind. I’ve been waiting for Gnome 2.8 to hit the Gentoo portage tree so I can emerge it and check it out.

I’ve been wondering though… how these tools will work between the various conventions that each distro uses? Or is it up to the distro provider to provide the glue that will bind the User Interface tools with their distro specific idiosyncrasies?

2004-09-20 12:39 am

The review even didn’t use mandrake community, but mandrake beta 2 … look at this :

“I figured it would be great to have an easy setup of Bittorent but alas it did not work in the Beta 2 setup….maybe later.”

This is also not really a review.

I’m using mandrake cooker now (it’s a little bit more recent as community), and I have to say, that it looks really polished, and stable.

If it’s really worth the upgrade … It depends. If you have a running mandrake 10.0 distribution, stick with it. There is no really big differences between 10.0 and 10.1.

A previous comment was down on the community version, I think this is not warranted anymore. The 10.1 community is very stable. I have been using each 10.1 beta and RC and they have been much better than those in the 10.0 release cycle. Even the first beta was useable, and the community release is fine for home use. I agree that there were a lot of problems with 10.0, but we are onto a new release and you certainly cannot judge 10.1 community by bugs in a release 5 iso sets and six months ago.

2004-09-20 6:45 am

and that is: fcked up sftp kioslave in KDE. saving to remote server (which has sun’s sshd) over sftp kioslave (from quanta from example) does not work unless remote file has 777 permissions. pat-he-tic. they’ve fcked up this in every single version… i once again wasted my time at work, hoping i could use mdk. X also freezes about every time when browsing web with konqueror.

why it is so goddamned hard for distro makers to NOT apply their shitty patches. those patches do not fix _anything_. they just break _everything_.

back to good old slackware…

2004-09-20 7:15 am

3. Management of Networking Features

One thing you have to love about SuSE is that by using YAST, the operating system has a graphical user interface for almost all of the networking features like: Samba, NFS, VNC, DNS, HTTP,LDAP,TFTP, etc. Mandrake is moving that way but I think new administrators coming from Windows are looking for these features in an operating system. This could be a very significant upgrade.

$urpmi drakwizard and that’s it

drakwizard allows you to launch :

– server wizard: configures basic services.

– global wizard: wizard that launch each other.

– dhcpd, dns, postfix, samba, firewall, web, ftp, news, time wizards…

2004-09-20 8:41 am

…I’m not using any other Mandrake.

I’ve used Mandrake since 8.1 days and it got to the top with 9.1 release, since then they have been loosing quality with every release, and the 10.0 was the final drop I will go for SuSE or even Windows because 10.0 is way more buggy than Windows you may bet!

Also I don’t understand why Mandrake releases their distros so soon, if they waited 2/3 months they would ship KDE 3.3.2, Gnome 2.8.3, X.org 6.8.4 and so on and they would have a lot of debug time, but instead they release a old, buggy distro…

Other thing is that I only take seriously 2 distros: Mandrake and SuSE, since Mandrake is out of commission I only have SuSE left… hope they don’t fail me.

2004-09-20 9:08 am

Sad to say it, but I only can agree to this. Currently still using 9.2, tried 10.0 3 times and it simply crashed on me with inconsistent behaviour (means it crashed differently every time).

Nevertheless, I will try 10.1 as soon as it is freely downloadable. Hope this works better than 10.0.

2004-09-20 9:20 am

it got to the top with 9.1 release

What? The 9.1 release was already much worse than 9.0, which was quite on par with 8.2, quality-wise. But with 9.1 it became so bad that I switched to Gentoo and I never came back, nor did I look any further.

Good luck with SuSE, I hope you like it. I didn’t, I had to puke when I saw that they (SuSE 8.2) were even worse at patching everything and doing things the non-standard way.

Give Gentoo a try, you will have to use the command line a little more (there are alternatives, eg. Porthole and Gnome System Tools, but CLI is fastest), but it works really well.

2004-09-20 9:36 am

the review was very pertinent in that each point is a very true criticiism of mandrakes previous releases too.

2004-09-20 10:23 am

I won’t/can’t use Gentoo because I can’t my spend time compiling everything I want.

One of the thing Mandrake has best is it’s RPM repository and urpmi.

My perfect distro would probably be the one I can configure everything from a single interface and install whatever program there could be trough a RPM package.

2004-09-20 10:27 am

I had allready installed Fedora Core 3 beta1, Mandrake 10.1

Community installer actually asked me if i would like to upgrade it lol.Which obviously turned out not to be a very good choice.I can understand that “new” ( as in new to linux)

peeps will be bitten in the nose right away.Perhaps they don’t

don’t download community editions, but then again this is a near commercial one.

Hi, I just discovered a “hidden” feature in Mandrake 10.1 while looking for a missed package. I was looking for the catalan language package for kde 3.2.3 that has been “forgotten” at the distro (it is one of the more up to date language package even when we have “just” 10 milion speakers) when I found the 4th CD having a directory (media/kde3.3) containing the kde3.3 packages.

I’m going to try them right now and I hope they’ll will work. I need them because of the sftp issue that is very important to me too.

Appart of that I like this review. It solved me a couple of problems I had with some hardware and I’ve found some very nice improvements to the system.

I think that it is normal that it has errors. If you don’t want errors, just use the official version three monthes after it appears.

I neither agree about not making modifications to the programs. It is good that the different distros try to patch the standard kde branch with some changes. If those changes are good, they’ll will make into the standard branch sooner or later. Too many changes make the system unstable, so we make sure they’ll not go too far. But too litle changes produce less innovation over all the community.

If you don’t like those changes just use another distro, but you don’t need to be unkind with them.

At the same time, making changes to the main branch of kde makes Mandrake developers know very well about the code they are playing with, and that, again, is a good thing for their customers.

I like this distro very much.

2004-09-20 1:05 pm

At this moment I am also a SuSE 9.1 user, but I will change my system to any YAST-free distro.

2004-09-20 3:27 pm

Mandrake’s urpmi has all the functionality of apt. Were you aware of it? If not, where would you suggest Mandrake mention its availability to make people more aware of it?

2004-09-20 3:45 pm

could the people who just say mandrake is “buggy” or “crashes” or “freezes” please be more specific, and, preferably, file some bug reports? You can bet that doesn’t happen to the developers, or the software wouldn’t be released, so if you don’t report the problem, how’s it ever going to be fixed?

btw, as an MDK user since 8.1, my personal perception is that 8.2, 9.1 and 10.0 were great releases. 9.0 and 9.2 were pretty crapped up in places. I’m liking 10.1 myself – just installed it last night on a brand-new HTPC box with an SATA hard disk and TV-out only, no VGA out and everything works, I had 5.1 audio, DVD playback, playback of any media imaginable, MAME and PlayStation emulation all up and running before I went to bed – but it’s too early to categorise it, have to see what the general reaction is like.

BTW, the many suggestions that “not much have changed” in 10.1 are based on pretty bad investigation. If the only change you care about is KDE 3.3, sure, it’s true. But suggesting that a GNOME revision, a big set of kernel updates, several completely new drak utilities, (another) rewrite of mcc, X.org, udev, a bunch of work on hotpluggable hardware and many other less-immediately-visible changes add up to “not much” is pretty wrong.

2004-09-20 3:49 pm

the comment about firewire networking in the review can be safely disregarded. the bug there is actually in the release notes; this was in fact fixed before 10.1 CE was released. Firewire ports are now put last in the device name queue (so on my new box the nvidia network port is eth0, the second onboard gigabit port is eth1, and ethernet-over-firewire gets eth2).

2004-09-20 3:53 pm

is the centrino wireless (ipw2100) working as planned for 10.1? (in particular the dell 8600). i know the ipw2100 develops fast so it’ll be interestign to see what mandrake stettled upon.

2004-09-20 4:14 pm

You have two possibilities :

– There is a ipw2100 module in the Mandrake kernel, which is Free (GPL).

Obviously this review does not concern the Community version, and the news should be corrected accordingly. As mentioned above by Adam and other people, some reported bugs in this article have been corrected, and the article even mentions beta 2 !

This article is not very serious.

2004-09-20 4:43 pm

actually, to be fair to the review, there’s still a release note somewhere, I think on the wiki, stating that the firewire problem is current. They could have actually tested it, though, instead of parroting the note…

2004-09-20 4:49 pm

btw, just to reassure you, ipw2100 was discussed recently on cooker list and is known to work perfectly. ipw2200 is a different story, but that goes for any distro…

2004-09-20 6:13 pm

Just curious, wasn’t there also going to be a ppc version of 10.1? Any news on that?

2004-09-20 7:51 pm

Ralph, thanks to the support of the community, the PPC version which was dropped in 10.0 lives again.

im holding back for 10.1 official, just like i held back for 10.0 official…

other then that, im glad to hear about the firewire stuff as i wonderd why the hell it ended up as eth0.

as for those complaining about low versions on stuff like gnome or kde. the feature freeze was way before eitehr of those releases where in the news (remember that community have gone thru atleast 2 betas and 2 RC versions). you either get “older” stable stuff or you get “younger” unstable stuff, just look at debian. and most likely by the time official is out someone have packaged kde and gnome for mandrake and you can updte via urpmi:)

2004-09-21 4:09 pm

for technical interest, it was a pretty simple reason…firewire was getting initialised before networking in the startup scripts, so it hogged eth0. now it’s switched around so the conventional NICs get to start up first.

2004-09-21 4:12 pm

as per previous comments in this thread, KDE 3.3 is available as an unsupported special urpmi media on the ISOs for 10.1 CE, and GNOME 2.8 has been packaged by Goetz Washck, initially for Cooker, but since Cooker and CE are currently basically identical, the packages should work.